[Taxacom] FW: Red List of Insect Taxonomists in Europe

[Shorthouse, David]

All -

I assume the ultimate end-game with such a Red List of Taxonomists is
to in fact examine trends not merely raw, incomplete, point-in-time
snapshots. The goal may be to marry numbers of active taxonomists &
their productivity (however measured) to available money contributed
by nations / funding agencies. The assumption is that national monies
have dried-up, local numbers of taxonomists have dwindled, recruitment
is poor, attrition is rampant, productivity has crashed, and decision
makers will react by responding in kind. And, whosoever compiles such
a list will have the necessary ammunition to celebrate successful
nations / funding agencies & embarrass laggard nations, which are
perhaps further categorized using a capitalistic, conservation-defying
metric like GDP that decision makers understand. It doesn't take much
to realize that this has big, big problems, the least of which is the
possibility that global taxonomic productivity has not crashed despite
the assumed dwindling number of local taxonomists because the slack is
taken-up by other nations. That possibility may lead to a declaration
of success by national funding agencies, even for the delinquent
nations, no? Would we ever be sufficiently compelling to elicit a
comparably competitive race for space, the moon, or Mars? The allure
for those endeavours (besides the contract monies and new jobs to make
gadgets) is that no one nation owns nor claims any political
responsibility for the frontier of space, the moon, or Mars. It is
also a quirk of pride for nations and funding agencies to declare that
races were won despite their meagre means. This is not a game we want
to play.

Does this Red List of Taxonomists (EU focused for now, correct?) help
the discipline compete for attention, receive committed funds, and
sway hiring committees? Would it make more sense to find a way to
eliminate our language of institutions or nations altogether
throughout the building of the list – make it global from the outset –
& let decision makers fulfil their own visions of pride?

David

On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:46 AM Frank T. Krell via Taxacom
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> Dan Janzen wrote me and Lyubo following our quibble about town and institution in Lyubo's taxonomists survey:
> " Frank, Lyubo, what is this “institution” stuff?  As you  both know very well, a huge portion of the taxasphere work from home.Those of us users very much need those people as well as those in institutions, as well as we need ALL for our efforts to open the taxasphere silo to the wider world."
>
> Yes, the role of non-institutional taxonomists is paramount, will likely grow, and is rather neglected by the increasing legal red tape. I am lucky to be in an institution and can do taxonomy as one of my duties, but it took me leaving my country twice and moving to another continent to continue to afford it.
> Lyubo, one of the important outcome of your efforts would be to determine what percentage of active taxonomists are not paid by an institution for their taxonomic work. This is probably not so easy to determine, particularly if you have people with an institutional address, but the institute wants them to do other things and they do their taxonomy in their free time. We might also have to reach out to local listservers or regional societies to reach people outside the Anglosaxon sphere. I would be very interested in hard data on this.
>
> Anyway, all taxonomists should do this little survey https://red-list-taxonomists.eu/ I hope that nor all Americans will be at the University of Hawai'I by default 😊.
>
> Cheers
>
> Frank